by Teresa Bruce
“Dentists! Even their own mothers shudder at their offspring,” Claudio proclaims as he reaches out to shake Gary’s hand.
It turns out he was in Lima getting a tooth pulled when his cousins reached him on his cell phone. He drove back through the desert at ninety miles an hour to catch up to us at his ranch in Pisco. It is too dark for a tour of the distillery, and the anesthetic is still slurring Claudio’s words. So the three of us sit around and drink pisco until the pain of the long drive and the dentist are merely memories.
The more pisco I drink, the better I understand Claudio’s temporarily sloppy English and his dry sense of humor. When the temperature plunges in the desert night, we move the collection of half-empty pisco bottles from a stone outdoor patio to a tiled indoor sitting room. I can’t help calling our host Don Claudio, and he does not object.
He is grizzled and callused yet elegant and amusing. It may be the pisco but I’m sure this man I’ve just met can waltz as skillfully as he drives a tractor. He tells us he is Italian and his ancestors were winemakers from Genoa. His grandfather came to Peru in 1900 and started making pisco, and the skill was handed down for three generations. Don Claudio now markets his pisco under the brand name Huarangal.
“Once upon a time there were forests of huarango trees growing along the Peruvian coast,” Don Claudio explains. “But then the bad times came and they were all chopped down for firewood.”
As much as the desert seems to define Don Claudio, I am startled to find out that he is actually a refugee. He and his wife, Isabel, raised their two daughters in Lima. They owned a restaurant for fifteen years, but in 1988 Shining Path guerrillas bombed the restaurant’s street in Miraflores.
“The whole city was without power, and all you could hear was the roar of generators,” Don Claudio remembers, his toothache suddenly throbbing again and in need of another dose of pisco. Drink me, I hear the bottle saying, and I feel shrunken and off balance, afraid to hear what happened next.
“So many people were getting killed that my daughters were afraid to go to school. So we packed it all up and moved to Pisco to grow grapes.”
When the terrorism died down, his girls wanted to go back to school in Lima. Isabel lives with them in the capital during the week while Claudio runs the distillery.
“Could the Shining Path regain power again?” he rhetorically questions the room now slowly spinning around my head. “Never. They accomplished nothing and their voice was wasted. There is no longer an audience for communist or socialist ideas, and no leaders have risen to take the place of those in jail. It is over.”
We toast to the end of the revolution, if not the struggle, and the next morning Don Claudio shows us his vision of Peru’s future. Grape juice and skins ferment in open-air, concrete tanks for three days. Then he seals the tanks, depriving the fomenting mix of oxygen for another twelve days. The pisco is pumped underground through plastic pipes and outside to a copper contraption that resembles a cross between a minaret and a giant tea kettle.
“It’s called an alambique; it’s Arabic in origin,” the lab-coat clad Claudio explains. “It distills the liquid from eight thousand liters down to two thousand. For the first year it tastes like piss, and you can’t sell it until it has aged for at least three years.”
The sign of a great pisco, according to Claudio, is the tornado-like funnel of bubbles it makes when you cradle a bottle by its neck and twirl it in a slow circle. Don Claudio makes three varieties of Huarangal pisco, and over the course of our stay on his ranch we research each one. I can testify with no statistically significant margin of error that bottles of all three produce a perfect cascade of tiny bubbles when twirled and a pang of regret when emptied. I feel like a guest at a mad tea party, and if we stay any longer we might never return to normal size.
Chapter Thirty-Four
LINES IN THE SAND
We are less than a day’s drive to the mysterious lines of Nazca, but we arrive too late in the afternoon to sign up for one of the prop-plane sightseeing tours. It’s a splurge worth indulging in because it is only from the air that the still unexplained, miles-long geometric lines and fantastical shapes emerge from the plains into which they are etched. We will have to wait until morning for the winds to calm and Don Claudio’s pisco to clear.
Nazca is literally a landmark, the crust of the earth carved and lined by an ancient people whose motives are as fuzzy as my memories. On my first trip through Peru we drove on top of the Nazca lines and I never saw a thing. That’s because when construction of the Pan-American Highway began in 1938, the asphalt was poured before the plains were aerially surveyed and the drawings officially “discovered.” The route that was supposed to modernize a continent bisected and destroyed a part of its history.
The geography has not forgiven the transgression. It might be the lingerings of a pisco hangover, but ever since we left the wonderland of Don Claudio’s ranch the desert has taken on a horrific harshness. So we probably shouldn’t stop at a cemetery on the outskirts of Nazca that is renowned for the callousness of grave robbers. The sun has less than an hour left to hover over Chauchilla, and we lock the camper even though we are the only humans in sight.
“Make that the only humans still breathing,” Gary says as he lifts his camera to document the most disturbing scene we have ever encountered.
We are standing at the base of what guidebooks claim is the world’s largest sand dune, but it seems more like a giant pile of ash. Some four hundred pre-Hispanic tombs lie in its shadow, a dozen or so officially excavated and their contents preserved in far-off museums. The soil is so caked and blanched it looks too tight to stretch over what lies beneath.
In shallow depressions, femurs stick out of the sand where robbers disturbed ancient graves and then abandoned them. Tufts of hair and strips of burial cloth drift and bluster along zigzags of cracked earth. Bleached and broken skulls balance on the tops of boulders like sentries watching over their own graves.
I gulp, thinking of another, smaller grave a continent away. This drive down the Highway seems suddenly macabre, a dark quest lurching from one painful point in the past to another. If the original camper still exists, won’t I be just as guilty as a grave robber, disturbing whatever peace finally settled with it?
The wind makes raspy, scraping sounds across the parched expanses; it is so wide open that there is nothing against which brittle bones can take shelter. They just bounce and jar along, at the mercy of taunting gusts. Gary is taking photographs just yards in front of me, but the wind is so strong I can’t hear his voice, and I have to turn my face from the stinging kernels of sand.
That’s when I see her: the skeleton of a woman squatting on her haunches. She has long, flaming-red hair. Present tense, as in a full head of hair still attached to an intact skull, fluttering in the swirls of wind that swoop down into what was supposed to be her final resting place. It is parted precisely down the middle, and I wonder whose gentle hands combed through it, preparing her for the afterlife. A grieving mother’s? A beloved sister’s? I can’t imagine why they didn’t close her mouth—her jawbone gapes open in a silent scream, and her eye sockets are stuffed with some sort of cotton.
She is faced east but will never see another sunrise. I run back to the camper and retrieve a bottle of Don Claudio’s pisco to leave by her side. I know that it will probably be stolen by the same vandals who plundered her grave. But she should have some passing recognition; the pisco is a fellow traveler’s token of comfort for whatever journey she is on.
WE MAKE A RESERVATION FOR THE FIRST PROP-PLANE TOUR OF THE morning, when the still-cool winds are supposed to be the calmest. My stomach lurches as we lift off into the empty sky, but almost immediately awe spreads like a soothing tonic through every clenched muscle. From the air, the plains of Nazca are a borderless sketchpad, and symbols emerge from the sand like rubbings on a faded gravestone. The lines look surprisingly fragile and delicate—more like erasings than drawings. Some figures, like the spiral-
tailed monkey, have a whimsical quality. But the geometric shapes and random lines—created several hundred years after the animal figures were made—are more intriguing. Looking down on them from the perspective of a condor is irresistibly speculative, the possible answers as infinite as the questions they present.
“They were artists,” Gary says through the mouthpiece of the headphones that connect us.
For him the Nazca lines don’t need to represent anything; the fact that they exist and add beauty to the universe is enough. I am getting more accustomed to this absence of certainty. I am content with close, or maybe. It is dawning on me that the search is reward itself. But I can’t shake the sense that there’s a lesson in the lines below me.
Maybe, like the person I was at the start of this journey, the people who created Nazca were trying to impose some sort of order on the world around them. The lines could have been an ancient attempt at control, a stab at permanence. It didn’t matter in the end. Time erased whatever seemed important at the time. Planning and plotting did not preserve their purpose. But instead of filling me with a sense of futility, the Nazca lines release me. The future will not judge my logic, whether I stuck to a map, plotted the right course, followed the rules, or kept to a schedule. There is only the present.
The plane touches down and I step onto soil that feels more solid than it did the day before. The wind is picking up when we drive away from Nazca’s plundered graves and celebrated mysteries. We will follow my father’s route up into the Peruvian highlands, through the looking glass of the girl I once was. I am ready. I have maps. I am prepared. But it will not matter. Whatever will happen next will do so without any regard for my plans or my purpose.
Chapter Thirty-Five
FLAMINGO DREAMS
I am holding thirty-year-old photographs of the ascent from Nazca into the Andes, comparing sand dunes. Every one we pass matches those in the photos. The road’s curves bend in the same direction, and there are still landslides and boulders to dodge. The only difference is that the sheer drop-offs of Highway 26A are now lined with guardrails and the surface is smoothly paved. My ears are popping and Gary says he feels a little lightheaded. But the Ford F-350 purrs along at fifty miles an hour, as if the pistons and injector nozzles don’t remember that they spent the past few weeks driving through a desert level with the sea.
The thinness of the air accentuates the clarity and intensifies the hues of the landscape we are zooming through. Lichens and mosses cling to the otherwise barren rock in shouts of triumphant green and plucky yellow. The sky beams with a piercing blue instead of listless grey.
“What’s wrong?” Gary asks.
I touch my face; tears are streaking through the grit. Not a thing is wrong. I am crying because instead of the ugly grey llamas I remember, the wild vicuñas we pass are the color of butter and apricot jam.
We pull over to make sandwiches for lunch. My hands quiver as I slice the bread. I light a burner to make tea and stare, fixated on the flickering blue ring of flame struggling for oxygen. My ears don’t register the sound of the kettle’s whistle; it isn’t until I feel Gary’s hand on my shoulder that I snap out of it and pour the boiling water. Down the drain. I can’t remember where we keep the plastic mugs. Gary brings out a roll of toilet paper instead of napkins, and I can’t figure out which hand to hold it in.
“Maybe we should have a picnic outside,” Gary says. “The cold air might feel good.”
But when we walk away from the camper we forget about eating. It is all I can do to walk in a straight line, and Gary stumbles, as if the camera strapped around his neck were suddenly leaden.
“Look,” he says. “There over.”
He is pointing to a shallow lake a few hundred yards in the distance that quivers in the sun like a bead of cobalt in a pan of gold. Hovering above it, as though wading through a mirage, is a flock of neon-pink flamingoes.
“How did they get up here?” I ask.
Flamingoes go with zoos and neatly mowed front yards. I am too tall. My head hits the sky. I am swimming through my own tears. The flock looks up to examine us, utterly without fear. We are Adam and Eve, pale and wingless in a garden of wind.
We sit down on a boulder and check the altimeter built into Gary’s watch. We have climbed from sea level to 14,261 feet. Since breakfast. Less than three thousand feet to go and we would be level with Mt. Everest’s base camp. But instead of slowly acclimatizing, with oxygen tanks and Sherpas to guide us, we have made this ascent in a matter of hours. The realization sets off a minor panic somewhere in the back of my fuzzy brain. I must be hallucinating. My nose will start to bleed. Gary might pass out at the wheel. We could get in a wreck.
Nothing makes sense. I don’t know who that big camper sitting on the white truck belongs to or why I’m sitting here watching flamingoes. Where is my little sister? I should look at my list. Somewhere I have a list that will say what to do. But it is so beautiful that I start giggling instead. I put our ham sandwiches on the dirt, next to each other.
“For a pillow,” I tell Gary, and from our backs we watch silver clouds float over the top of the world.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE ROAD
Except for the pink flamingoes, I am certain this is the same exact spot where we stopped thirty years ago. A memory of teaching my little sister how to play leapfrog floats through my foggy consciousness.
“I scrunched down into a tiny ball, like this.” Telling the story to Gary, I feel as though it happened yesterday. I have to touch the earth to keep from falling into it, light-headed and off balance. “Then I told Jenny to run as fast as she could, straddle her legs, push off my back, and say, ‘Ribbit,’ like a frog.”
I’m sure my father was underneath the truck, fixing something. My mother was probably trying to boil water for his coffee. Nobody was watching us until my sister’s scream pierced through the thin air. Startled vicuñas ran away, bleating and tripping over the rocks. The curled surface of my back couldn’t have been more than two feet from the ground. But after six months of sporadic nutrition, a two-foot fall was enough to snap a two-year-old’s shoulder.
Normally Jenny bounced into the cab of the Jeep and flipped herself into the backseat in head-over-heels giggles. But now she couldn’t reach for the door handle to pull herself up. Her lips were as purple as Tootsie-Pop stains, and all her words ran together.
“Owiemommyithurtssobaaaaaaaad,” Jenny moaned.
MAY 30TH, 1974
We think Jen broke her shoulder bone. Taped it and padded her seat. No doctor for day or so.
In 1974, the road cutting through the Andes from Nazca was a four-hundred-mile-long gravel rut, snaking through canyons of sideways-slipping slate.
MAY 31ST, 1974
Put blanket on engine so wouldn’t freeze during night. Everyone woozy. Jen very restless. I blacked out.
The fear of freezing was founded. The altimeter in my father’s truck had already iced over, leaving the needle stuck at fifteen thousand feet. The next day we made it only ten miles before my mother took out her journal again. She committed the misery to paper, like a passenger on a plane about to crash.
JUNE 1ST
Road too terrible to describe. Still at 14,000 to 15,000 feet. Breathing hard. I think we’ve had it.
I think we’ve had it. My mother’s spirit broke in those five short words. When you are seven and your mother shuts down, you stop fighting with your little sister. You remember how it felt when your brother disappeared, and his absence sits likes cold concrete in your stomach. You pretend you are anywhere but in the mountains of Peru. You stop asking, “Are we there yet?” when the winding dirt road never ends.
Seven days later, when you finally reach the hospital in Cusco, you think the fluorescent light that shines through the X-ray box on the wall is the most beautiful picture in the whole world. There it is—your little sister’s glowing collarbone in feathery white. Where it should be straight there is a vertical smudge of black. And th
en your mother leans in so close her nose almost touches the film and she starts to smile. There are threads of white knitting themselves across the gap; the bone is already healing itself.
JUNE 9TH, 1974
Beautiful. Ruins really something… met nice people—spoiled Jenny… went to bed tired but happy.
Eight days after the worst night of the entire journey, my mother held my sister’s good hand and climbed the steep Incan terraces of Machu Picchu.
“Damn, this is hard work,” my two-year-old sister muttered. Steps my mother could clear two at a time were thigh-high hurdles for Jenny. She stuck out her lower lip, blew the bangs away from her sweaty forehead, and grunted up each terrace.
“Damn, this is hard work,” louder this time. My mother and my father laughed until tears streamed down their faces. Their tough, beautiful little girl had survived.
I am scouring my mother’s journal, hoping she listed a place to camp anywhere on the road to Cusco. I can decipher her handwriting enough to identify one town, but the dates don’t match up. For a moment I wonder if we are traveling on a completely new highway instead of retracing the original passage. Then I realize we have blazed past the scene of my sister’s fall and covered, in less than one day, what my mother documented over the course of three.
I pack away the journal and continue on, sobered yet still exhilarated. Until this day it has seemed as though we are somehow continuing a road trip—one that was interrupted by thirty years. The parallels have amazed me: finding people mentioned fleetingly in my mother’s journal, getting sick in the same places and hit with the same attempts at bribes.